"Warnings" and colliery explosions

For two or three months past we have been told that we might expect to hear of some colliery explosions in the neighbourhood, because "warnings" had been manifested in the pits at Cwmnantddu, near Pontypool. The awful calamities in the Rhondda Valley and Ebbw Vale have too sadly verified these predictions. The "warnings," which are said to be still continued in the Sinking Pits at Cwmnantddu, are attributed by the men to supernatural causes, and have caused such fright that some of the miners declare that they will never enter the workings again on account of "the ghost."

At Tredegar, too, a panic prevails in consequence of an old gipsy woman having said that an explosion was likely to take place there! Now, it is quite time that belief in ghosts and fortune telling had died out. They are inconsistent with common sense and the exercise of reason. But we are not inclined to treat this talk about subterrraneous warnings with contempt. Far from it. We rather think it merits serious consideration and painstaking inquiry.

Let us examine it. One man is said to have seen something covered with a white sheet, and to have hit a hole right through it with his fist! The tom-foolery of this is too obvious, one would think, to need comment, and yet such ridiculous stuff is actually believed! We shall continue to endeavour to put an extinguisher on ghosts. What may have been heard is another matter, and has nothing to do with "spirits." The sounds are said to resemble those caaused by the rattling of chains, the running of trams, and "boring."  A man named Coleman appears to have been greatly led away by his imagination, and has caused a great deal of silly fear by asserting his fanciful experiences. We hope, for his own credit, that the tales have been manufactured for him, and are not his own utterances.

Mr. Joseph Green, mineral agent under the Ebbw Vale Company, has made a stand (all honour to him for doing so), against the prevalent superstitious "rot," and has placed sensible men as watchers or rather listeners in the Sinking Pits for some nights past. These men have failed to hear anything extraodinary. But it is not at all unlikely that some have heard sounds that require attention, though they need not excite foolish alarm. Nature has its throes now andt hen. When there is an eruption of Vesuvius (which appears to be agitated just now) the effects are felt far away. When Lisbon was almost entirely destroyed by an earthquake in 1755, the waters of the Hot Wells at Clifton, of Loch Lomond in Scotland, and at other places were disturbed.

When large quantities of coal are removed, the strata will naturally settle down, and very likely bad gases will be forced out from one place and driven into another. The whole of the earth's crust has been convulsed, and tossed, and tumbled, in a manner that makes one shudder to think of, but all has been in obedience to natural laws. Change is still going on, and the little local displacements and settlings down of strata are only what may be expected. In these, it seems to us, are to be traced the true cause of the noises that are heard in mines; we believe that in one sense they are "warnings;" warnings of the possible proximity of noxious gases or accumulation of water, forced near by the down-settling or ruptures of the strata, and calling for extra cacre and precautions in working the mines where such noises are heard. But there is certainly nothing supernatural in them.

The Western Mail, 11th March 1871.